Advanced Nonfiction Writing

Once you have some comfort with the basics of fact-gathering, the world of storytelling and interpretation awaits you. You can write essays and profiles and news features and narratives and memoirs. If you become proficient in the form, you can draw vivid portraits, dramatize an injustice, shape the culture, and explain the choices people make. You can become an artist or a cinematographer with words, capture the conversation of our time, show the reader the way we're living now.

This class offers an immersive discussion in and practice of the ways you can write true things. Come with an open mind and a willingness to try something new.

Drawing on the university and the city we live in, you will write four longer stories (1,200-1,500 words) and shorter in-class riffs. You will read and meet wonderful writers who will challenge you to follow in their paths. Together we'll workshop your stories and those we read for class. Because writing is a process, you'll rewrite and improve what you've created. You are measured by the final version only.